Hu Jintao's book club
This little news item is very interesting. I find the rest of this review to be rather disappointing though. Asia Times Online:
Therefore, it is not accidental that when the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Jintao, visited the US, he gave the book to President George W Bush, as a hint on how the United States should deal with its numerous geopolitical challenges. Yet one could doubt that Sun Tzu's advice would be of use to a US administration, regardless of who sits in the White House.
The message of the book is clear: war is won not through strength but through skillful manipulation - a victory of the writing brush and brains over sword and strength. This vision of war is related to another major point of the book, or at least can be interpreted in this way: war is not just the function of the military but is the exercise of the entire societal body. And it is here that the US military behemoth fails: America's socio-economic fabric as a whole is not designed to win the current wars, regardless of what seems to be enormous and constantly increasing investments in the country's military machine.
posted by Bravo 2-1 at 4:11 PM
1 Comments:
«The message of the book is clear: war is won not through strength but through skillful manipulation - a victory of the writing brush and brains over sword and strength»
How true.
As several veterans of the Nixon and Reagan Administrations rightly said (think Spiro Agnew, Jim Webb), foreign policy under the Bushcheneys father & son and under Clintongore was marked by America’s shameless submission to the Kings of Israel and the Princes of Arabia…which has brought about a fatal loss in autonomy and leeway as our foreign policy fell under the spell of shady Middle-Eastern operatives such as Prince Bindar Bin Saud and Jack Bin Abramoff.
Clearly, it’s time we got our country and our liberty back!
Jim Webb and Pat Buchanan are right: throughout the 1980’s classical political pragmatism (as opposed to the Neocons’ faux Pharisaic “idealism”) led President Reagan and Pope John Paul to play successfully Baghdad against Teheran; and Belgrade and Beijing against Moscow.
In those days, America and the West won wars in Iraq, Eastern Europe and Central Asia without firing a single shot!
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